Findings

Snap Judgment: Fleeting first impressions may be as accurate as
long-term thoughtful evaluations when it comes to sizing up good
teaching. That finding, as counterintuitive as it seems, comes from a
study conducted by Harvard University psychology professors Nalini
Ambady and Robert Rosenthal. The researchers showed nine undergraduate
students 10-second clips of Harvard teaching fellows at work with their
classes. In all the clips, there was either no sound or the teachers'
voices were electronically distorted so the students couldn't hear what
they were saying. The researchers asked the students to rate the
teachers' performances based on what they had seen. Their collective
responses, the researchers say, corresponded remarkably well with other
independent ratings of the teachers based on an entire academic term's
worth of observations. "Obviously, students pick up on certain
nonverbal cues in teachers,'' Ambady says, "and their impressions are
fairly accurate.'' The researchers also repeated the experiment with
two- and five-second clips and with high school teachers and their
students. They found that correlations between the quick judgments and
the more deliberative evaluations, although diminished slightly with
the shorter clips, remained high in all instances.

Does Head Start Pay Off?: The federal Head Start program pays off over
the long haul for white children but not nearly as much for
African-American children, according to two researchers from the RAND
Corp., a Santa Monica, Calif., think tank. Economists Janet Currie and
Duncan Thomas used data from national longitudinal surveys of mothers
and children to analyze the federal anti-poverty program's
cost-effectiveness. Writing in the current American Economic Review,
the researchers conclude that white children who participated in Head
Start did significantly better on academic tests than siblings who had
either stayed at home or gone to different preschools. What's more, the
gains they made seemed to last. They were less likely than their
brothers and sisters to repeat a grade in elementary school. In
comparison, the large test-score gains that African-American children
first made in Head Start faded out over time. And they were just as
likely as their nonparticipating siblings to be held back in school.
Children of both races, on the other hand, did get better access to
health care. But the authors say those benefits did not lead to
improvements in longer-term health indicators, such as height.
Considering

that the health services the program provides cost only $468 a
child, the researchers reasoned, the $3,500-per-child cost for Head
Start does not pay off for African-American children. Their
controversial findings have raised the hackles of Head Start proponents
who point out that other studies have shown just the opposite: that
black children gain more from Head Start than white children. Gregg
Powell, research director for the National Head Start Association, also
says the RAND study fails to account for what happens to families after
a child has gone through Head Start. As a result of what they learn
through the program, parents may do a better job with younger
offspring, he says. Both the researchers and critics agree, however,
that black children may reap fewer lasting benefits from Head Start
because they come disproportionately from poorer neighborhoods with
troubled schools. If those barriers were removed, the researchers
write, "the program could probably be judged an incontrovertible
success.''

Grouping Kids By Sex: A recent study points to a simple--but
effective--way teachers can cut down on the gender stereotyping in
their classrooms: avoid dividing the class into teams or groups of boys
and girls. In a report published in the August issue of Child
Development, Rebecca Bigler describes an experiment involving
elementary school children attending a summer school program. In one
set of classrooms, teachers frequently grouped children by gender for
classroom tasks. One teacher, for example, gave boys and girls separate
bulletin boards and segregated classroom seating by sex. In another
group of classrooms, students were randomly classified as either
"blues'' or "reds'' for activities. In the third group of classes,
students were grouped in no special way. After four weeks, Bigler
writes, the students in the classrooms that highlighted gender
differences were more likely than before--and more likely than the
others--to rate certain occupations as appropriate for "only men'' or
"only women.''

--Debra Viadero

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